middleware management with oracle enterprise manager grid control 10g r5

Middleware Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g R5 Monitor, diagnose, and maximize the system performance of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions Debu Panda Arvind

Middleware Management with

Oracle Enterprise Manager

Grid Control 10g R5

Monitor, diagnose, and maximize the system

performance of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions

Debu Panda

Arvind Maheshwari

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Manager Grid Control 10g R5

Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing

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However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information

First published: November 2009

Middleware market is a fast growing market with a variety of vendors ranging

from enterprise grade middleware products such as Oracle's Fusion Middleware to

open source efforts such as JBoss and Apache Tomcat Oracle Fusion Middleware

is the number one middleware in the market with over 90,000 customers

Enterprise Manager provides an integrated management solution for Oracle Fusion

Middleware It is a complete management solution for the Oracle stack, which

includes Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, Oracle Enterprise Linux,

Oracle VM, and packaged applications such as Oracle eBusiness Suite, Siebel

CRM, and PeopleSoft It also leverages the built-in management capabilities in the

Oracle stack to provide an integrated and end-to-end management solution for the

Oracle eco-system

In a typical datacenter, there are multiple Middleware platforms Monitoring,

application performance management, configuration management, and life cycle

operations of diverse middleware platforms is very expensive Most of the new JEE

applications are composite applications built with multi-tiered architecture and

hence management of such applications needs specialized tools As Information

Technology becomes the core to the success of any business, there is a greater need

of business-IT alignment This book will show you how Enterprise Manager from

Oracle meets these new challenges in the data center and can help reduce the total

cost of ownership as well allow IT to contribute to a greater business success

Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g R5 was released in March 2009 This version

of Enterprise manager provides management capability for Oracle and non-Oracle

middleware platform that includes Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Application

Server, Oracle Coherence, Oracle SOA Suite, IBM Web Sphere, and JBoss Application

Server, and many more This book will help you understand how Enterprise

Manager Grid Control provides for better business-IT alignment and allows IT

to not just manage middleware but also manage business processes implemented

using SOA architecture

releases of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control

This book covers the management challenges faced by Middleware administrators

in the evolving Middleware market The book includes the authors' practical

experience in adopting Enterprise Manager Grid Control in managing Oracle Fusion

Middleware It is a must read for anyone using Enterprise Manager Grid Control for

managing middleware and JEE applications deployed in the data center

Ali Siddiqui,

Vice President—Product Development Fusion Middleware Management,

Oracle Corporation

About the Authors

Debu Panda, lead author of the best selling EJB 3 in Action (Manning Publications),

is a Product Management Director on the Oracle Fusion Middleware Management

development team, where he drives development of the middleware management

aspects of Oracle Enterprise Manager He has more than 17 years of experience in the

IT industry and has published more than 30 articles on enterprise Java technologies

and has presented at leading technology conferences such as Oracle Open World,

Java One, and so on Debu maintains an active blog on middleware technologies at

http://www.debupanda.com

I would like to thank my wife, Renuka, for her immense support

and continuous encouragement and for her patience with all the late

nights and weekend hours I have spent on the book in the past 9

months I would also like to thank my kids, Nistha and Nisheet,

who did not demand my attention while I wrote this book

Many thanks to Rajiv Taori, Senior Director of Product Management

and Ali Siddiqui, Vice President of Oracle Application and Systems

Management Products for allowing me to fit this book into my busy

schedule, and for their constant encouragement

Thanks to Rajiv K Maheshwari, Rao Bethanabotla, Madhav Sathe,

Nicole Haba, Rahul Goyal, Senthil Saivam, Sandeep Pandita, Ajay

Jagannatha Rao and the entire Enterprise Manager Middleware

Management development team at Oracle for their help while

writing the book

Many thanks to James Lumsden, Srimoyee Ghoshal, Darshana

Shinde, and Arani Roy, and the entire team at Packt Publishing for

turning our drafts to a book! I would also like to extend my thanks to

all the reviewers of the book

Finally, I would like to thank my co-author Arvind Maheshwari for

his hard work and help in completing the book

Enterprise Manager development team, is focused on building management

solutions for middleware He has 15 years of experience in the IT industry and has

played the role of Developer, Consultant, Architect, and Manager in the Financial,

Manufacturing, and Telecom industries, developing enterprise solutions that are

deployed in high-availability architectures

I thank my wife Seema, kids Ashutosh and Anusha, for letting me

use precious family time to work on this book

I thank my management chain—Ali Siddiqui, Rajiv Maheshwari,

and Rahul Goyal for supporting the idea of writing a book about

Middleware management

I thank Senthil Saivam, Manish Bisarya, Rishi Saraswat, Venkatesh

Audinarayan, Govinda Sambamurthy, Sandeep Pandita, Rajiv

Kuriakose, Ravi Ummadi, Suresh Kotha, Anil Kumar, Priya

Ulaganathan, Rajesh Vemana, and all of my colleagues for their

help and support while writing the book

I thank my co-author Debu Panda—who provided guidance at every

step of this project

I thank Srimoyee Ghoshal and James Lumsden at Packt Publishing

for coordinating this project and ensuring that this book sees the

light of day

About the Reviewers

Joseph S Gomez, has been in the IT field for 13+ years and loves every minute

of it Originally educated as a Graphic Designer, Joe was working at an art studio

(as most Graphic Designers do) when his sister mentioned that there were several

local companies willing to hire people and give them paid training to prepare them

for the Y2K boom That was all that it took and Joe hasn't looked back since Joe is

now the technical lead for his employer's OLAP Center of Excellence and is currently

working on the Business Intelligence team as well

In addition to enjoying his work in IT, Joe is also an author himself having

co-authored the book, Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide, with his good

friend Sarma Anantapantula

Ulises Lazarini, is the President of Consultoria Informatica Lazarini, and partner

of Oracle with more than ten years of experience working with Oracle databases and

an OCP member since Oracle 7.3.4., 8 8i 9i, and 10g

He has been an Oracle instructor in the kernel field for more than 12 years now

He has been a speaker on Oracle Open World (September 2008, "Migration from

Siebel 7.8 running on SQL Server to Oracle 10g RAC"), DBA Consultant of two

Database Successful Oracle Cases Ulises has been very active in the installation

and monitoring of RAC environments for OLTP and DataWarehouses Databases

He has been responsible for the high availability for global's databases

has worked with technology all his life He is presently employed by Pacific

DBMS Pty Ltd

He works with Oracle database, Middleware Fusion and Enterprise Manager with

clients in Brisbane Peter's career spans 25 years in technology and 13 years in

database management

Peter has worked mainly in Australia and Asia Peter's other interests include

studying Asia and its cultures and of course its food, sailing and football He can

be found supporting his team each season at the stadium

He has a wife and two children who say that they have to suffer through the times

of editing books, amongst other projects Peter would like to thank them for their

understanding and allowing dad to do his stuff at times!

Peter can be reached on the Internet at peter.mclarty@pameacs.com

Table of Contents

Key features of Enterprise Manager Grid Control 13

Products managed by Enterprise Manager 20

Chapter 2: Installing Enterprise Manager Grid Control 27

Installing Grid Control 10gR1 or 10gR2 30

Upgrading to Grid Control 10gR5 34

Starting and stopping the repository database 38

Chapter 4: Managing Oracle WebLogic Server 59

Discovering WebLogic Server 62

Adding a new WebLogic Server Domain 62

Event notifications and setting metric thresholds 66

Setting up notification methods 68

Setting the notification rules 69

Tasks for Oracle Applications Server Administrator 98

Applications performance monitoring 109

Chapter 6: Managing Forms and Reports Services

Architecture of Oracle Forms and Reports Services 130

Monitoring of Oracle Forms and Reports Services 131

Discovery of Oracle Forms and Reports Server 131

Setting the metric thresholds 132

Setting the metric thresholds 134

Monitoring configuration 149

Agent configuration 150

Monitoring Configuration 153

Monitoring BPEL PM and BPEL processes 153

BPEL process metrics 157

Monitoring model for BPEL processes 159

Best practices for BPEL PM management and monitoring 173

Introducing Oracle Service Bus (OSB) 176

Business service 178

Monitoring proxy services 181

Monitoring business services 185

Configuration management for Oracle Service Bus 187

Lifecycle management for Oracle Service Bus 187

Discovery of Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite 195

Monitoring Identity and Access Management Suite 200

Starting Coherence management node using bulk

The Coherence Target Model 210

Monitoring connections and connections managers 218

Chapter 11: Managing Non-Oracle Middleware 225

Managing IBM WebSphere MQ 238

Best practices for managing non-Oracle Java middleware 239

Monitoring Microsoft middleware 241

Service Level Monitoring for third-party targets 242

Monitoring and diagnosing Composite Applications with CAMM 248

Application Diagnostics for Java (AD4J) 253

Starting up AD4J Console 254

Diagnosing Java applications 256

Cross-tier diagnostics 260

Exercise—monitor Sun Java Web Server 266

Pre-requisites 266

Setup on agent side 267

Configuration from Enterprise Manager Console 268

Chapter 14: Best Practices for Managing Middleware

Define deployment procedures for all provisioning activities 287

Select monitoring indicators and define acceptable limits 288

Information publishing 298

Rob's Blackberry screams in the middle of the night He picks it up with hesitation

He gets a text message from an automated system, telling him that there are

serious issues in the applications that he supports, and users in Australia are facing

problems as well Rob is an administrator for middleware applications He opens his

laptop and starts looking at the issue After hours of investigation he finds that the

external web service their application depends on is not responding

This might sound familiar It's typical in the life of many of today's administrators

Welcome to the world of middleware management, where life starts with service

violations and ends with the diagnostics of performance issues

Most modern applications have become global, and run 24X7 and if you are a

middleware administrator then probably your work has become 24X7 too Today's

applications are very complex and depend on several components that you, as an

administrator, do not have control over But you have the responsibility to make sure

that the application meets availability and performance criteria You probably want

to avoid situations like Rob's and do away with sleepless nights You probably want

to be proactive and implement the right tools and methodologies so that you can

avoid many of the interruptions to your applications

Throughout this book, we will discuss how you can use Oracle Enterprise

Manager to proactively monitor your middleware applications and the

underlying infrastructure

Before we do that, let us first drill down and examine the various complexities in

modern applications

Complexities in modern applications

Modern day applications are way more complex than predecessors such as

client-server or mainframe applications Technologies such as the Internet, Java

Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have

revolutionized the way that applications are built and integrated They are multi-tier

and run on heterogeneous platforms They depend upon several resources within

and outside of organizations Today's resources may include an application running

on a mainframe system, or an ERP system, or resources made available by a partner

through the Internet, intranet, or extranet As an administrator, you may not have

control over these resources, or applications—however, you are responsible for

their performance

Some of the typical characteristics of modern applications are:

• Deployed on an application server or middleware

• Depends on databases and messaging providers

• May depend on applications running on mainframe systems or

legacy systems

• May depend on external services available over the internet or extranet

• May depend upon complex and long running business processes

• May have complex routing or workflow requirements

• May depend on a clustered caching service for faster data access

Also, today's applications have complex requirements with associated and specific

requirements such as:

• Availability

• Service Level

• Compliance and security

If you are a middleware administrator, you know that you have a lot of things to do!

You have to wear several hats from time to time

Middleware administrator—a man with

several hats

Unlike a database administrator or UNIX system administrator—a middleware

administrator has to be knowledgeable in several areas and perform a lot of tasks to

keep applications up and available You have to know how the application works

and understand its dependencies The most trivial applications have database access,

and hence you must be proficient in database technologies such as JDBC and SQL

You have to understand messaging systems and key technologies such as various

web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Most applications employ

different security mechanisms, such as using an LDAP Server, thus you have to

know the basics of security infrastructure

With modern application complexities, you have to be agile and you need the right

sets of tools and practices

If you are a middleware administrator then you know how your life goes! Some of

the typical tasks that middleware administrators perform are as follows:

• Monitors performance of production environment middleware and

associated applications

• Diagnoses production issues

• Plans for production deployment

• Installs/provisions software

• Tracks and applies patches

• Performs trend analysis and capacity planning for future growth

• Brings into compliance standards such as the Information Technology

Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

You may ask the question—how do you juggle between these tasks? What is the

optimal ratio of these tasks? There are no right answers here This is actually based

on your organization We have seen administrators just struggling to keep up with

monitoring the production middleware platform and making it highly available

This typically happens if you do not use the right tools and practices Administrators

spend most of their morning running several scripts to verify the health of their

middleware platform If you spend your entire morning checking the health of your

middleware platform, then it is highly unlikely that you will be able to perform all of

your tasks in your eight hour daily job!

Another challenge is that many organizations do not have full-time people who are

middleware administrators In some organizations, the database administrators or

developers take on additional responsibilities for middleware administration If you

are part of such an organization then it is really challenging for you to perform all

aspects of middleware management without the appropriate management tools

Key challenges faced by administrators

To compete, organizations are trying to keep their costs low This is putting greater

burdens on the IT infrastructure, which must remain agile to make the company's

applications highly available As a middleware administrator, you have more

responsibilities and less resources for keeping your infrastructure running and

maintaining the service levels of your applications Middleware administrators,

in particular, are faced with a number of challenges that come with managing a

complex application architecture Some of the key challenges are:

• Inability to manage multiple installs of a middleware package from a

single management console

• Lack of visibility to other tiers in the applications

• Managing application performance to meet service levels and application

diagnostics

• Compliance to standard practices such as Information Technology

Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

To cope with these challenges, you have to choose the right management tools

to manage your middleware infrastructure There are several tools available in

the marketplace However, if you are using Oracle Fusion Middleware; Oracle

Enterprise Manager is the right choice to manage your complete application

infrastructure Oracle Enterprise Manager not only provides great tools to manage

your Oracle databases but it also provides comprehensive functionalities to manage

your middleware infrastructure and enterprise applications

Throughout this book, we will provide an insight on how to manage applications

running on Oracle Fusion Middleware and third-party application servers

What this book covers

This book will help you to manage your middleware infrastructure and applications

effectively and efficiently using Oracle Enterprise Manager You will learn how

you can proactively monitor your production middleware applications running on

Oracle Application Server, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle SOA suite such as Oracle

BPEL Process manager, Oracle Server Bus, Oracle Coherence, and so on You will

learn different aspects of proactive monitoring and alert notifications, service level

management and incident management, diagnostics of production applications,

lifecycle automation using out-of-the-box deployment procedures, patching

mechanisms, and so on You will learn the best practices that you can use to

make your middleware infrastructure highly available

Chapter 1: Enterprise Manager Grid Control will introduce the key concepts of Oracle

Enterprise Manager Grid control You will learn about the Grid Control architecture

and terminology, basic concepts, and entities The lifecycle of a managed target in

Grid Control

Chapter 2: Installing Enterprise Manager Grid Control discusses installing Grid Control

and its key components You will also learn about various Grid Control versions,

platform support, and installation options, tricks for mass deployment of Grid

Control, high availability setup for Grid Control, and some guidelines on what

install/setup mode the user should use

Chapter 3: Enterprise Manager Key Concepts and Subsystems expands further on key

entities, subsystems that we introduced in Chapter 1 Besides expanding on those

we'll use these subsystems to answer work areas that we outlined in Chapter 1

We'll also provide the reader with some best practices for using each subsystem

Chapter 4: Managing Oracle WebLogic Server defines the typical management needs

for WebLogic environments and will apply solution areas learned from Chapter 3

We will have some example exercises on how to set up monitoring and management

for WebLogic Server's environment

We'll also list some of the best practices on how to manage a WebLogic Server

Chapter 5: Managing Oracle Application Server defines the typical management needs

for an Oracle Application Server environment and will apply solution areas learned

from Chapter 3

We will have some exercises on how to set up monitoring and management for an

Oracle Application Server environment We will discuss some of the key features

such as deployment and patch automation

We will also list some of the best practices on how to manage monitoring and

management for the Oracle Application Server environment

Chapter 6: Managing Forms and Reports Services and Applications provides an

introduction to Forms and Reports Monitoring You will learn about both Forms

Server and Forms Application Monitoring You will also learn about Forms Server

Cloning using Enterprise Manager Deployment Procedures

Chapter 7: SOA Management—BPEL Management firstly discusses the business/IT

alignment introduction Then the chapter explains what additional management

requirements it puts on middleware administrators

Also, in this chapter we'll define the typical management needs for SOA/BPEL

environments and will apply solution techniques learned from Chapter 3 We'll

also explain how to handle additional management requirements coming from

the business/IT alignments

We'll have some exercises on how to set up monitoring and management for

SOA/BPEL

Chapter 8: SOA Management—OSB (aka ALSB) Management will provide an

introduction to Oracle Service Bus and managing Oracle Service Bus We will

learn automated deployment of OSB applications and managing configurations

for OSB environment We will also list some of the best practices for managing

SOA/OSB environments

Chapter 9: Managing Identity Manager Suite discusses Oracle Fusion Middleware

Identity Manager Suite that enables the users to manage identity and access for

enterprise applications In this chapter, we'll discuss how to manage Oracle's

Identity Manager Suite with Enterprise Manager

Chapter 10: Managing Coherence Cluster discusses Oracle Coherence that is an

in-memory caching solution that enables organizations to predictably scale

mission-critical applications In this chapter, we'll discuss the monitoring,

configuration management, and provisioning aspects of Coherence Cluster

Chapter 11: Managing Non-Oracle Middleware discusses managing third-party

middleware We will learn about discovering and monitoring of IBM WebSphere,

JBoss, Apache HTTP Server, ApacheTomcat, and Microsoft middleware such as

Microsoft IIS We will also learn how to do service level management of applications

running on third-party middleware

Chapter 12: Java and Composite Applications Monitoring and Diagnostics discusses how

to diagnose Java applications using Oracle's Enterprise Manager product family such

as Application Diagnostics for Java (AD4J) and Composite Application Monitor and

Modeler (CAMM) CAMM allows you to diagnose performance issues in composite

applications whereas AD4J allows you to diagnose issues such as memory leak and

application in Java applications and the underlying JVM

Chapter 13: Building your Monitoring Plug-in contains detailed steps on how to

extend Grid Control functionality It'll have a step-by-step instructions for building

a monitoring plug-in for Sun System Web Server

Chapter 14: Best Practices for Managing Middleware Components Using Enterprise

Manager discusses some of the best practices for middleware management that

you can apply while using Enterprise Manager Grid Control to manage your

middleware applications

Who this book is for

Most people think of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control as a database

administration tool and are not aware of the middleware management capabilities

it offers This book helps you learn the middleware management functions and

the features offered by Oracle Enterprise Manager If you are a middleware

administrator or aspire to be one, then this book is for you This book will help

database administrators, developers, and system administrators who are supporting

applications that run on Oracle Fusion Middleware If you are a system architect,

application developer or application support person then this book will help you

to learn different perspectives on middleware and application infrastructures

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Enterprise Manager

Grid Control

The typical data center for a medium or large enterprise is composed of a myriad of

technologies One can see different types of hardware, operating systems, databases,

middleware, integration servers, storage devices, and networking devices in any such

data center Such diversity of technologies and operating systems can be attributed to

many factors, and some of them are:

Evolution of IT systems: As architectural patterns moved from monolithic

systems to distributed systems, not all IT systems were moved to the newest

patterns Some new systems were built with new technologies and patterns

whereas existing systems that were performing well enough continued on

earlier technologies

Best of breed approach: With multi-tiered architectures, enterprises had the

choice of building each tier using best of breed technology for that tier For

example, one system could be built using a J2EE container from vendor A,

but a database from vendor B

Avoiding single vendors and technologies: Enterprises wanted to avoid

dependence on any single vendor and technology This led to systems being

built using different technologies For example, an order-booking system

built using NET technologies on Windows servers, but an order shipment

system built using J2EE platform on Linux servers

Acquisitions and Mergers: Through acquisitions and mergers, enterprises

have inherited IT systems that were built using different technologies

Frequently, new systems were added to integrate the systems of two

enterprises but the new systems were totally different from the existing

systems For example, using BPEL process manager to integrate a CRM

system with a transportation management system

•

•

•

•

We see that each factor for diversity in the data center has some business or

strategic value At the same time, such diversity makes management of the data

center more complex To manage such data centers we need a special product like

Oracle's Enterprise Manager Grid Control that can provide a unified and centralized

management solution for the wide array of products

In any given data center, there are lots of repetitive operations that need to be

executed on multiple servers (like applying security patches on all Oracle Databases)

As data centers move away from high-end servers to a grid of inexpensive servers,

the number of IT resources increases in the data center and so does the cost of

executing repetitive operations on the grid Enterprise Manager Grid Control

provides solutions to reduce the cost of any grid by automating repetitive operations

that can be simultaneously executed on multiple servers Enterprise Manager Grid

Control works as a force multiplier by providing support for executing the same

operations on multiple servers at the cost of one operation

As organizations put more emphasis on business and IT alignment, that requires a

view of IT resources overlaid with business processes and applications is required

Enterprise Manager Grid Control provides such a view and improves the visibility of

IT and business processes in a given data center By using Enterprise Manager Grid

Control, administrators can see IT issues in the context of business processes and

they can understand how business processes are affected by IT performance

In this chapter, we will get to know more about Oracle's Enterprise Manager Grid

Control by covering the following aspects:

Key features of Enterprise Manager Grid Control:

Comprehensive view of data centerUnmanned monitoring

Historical data analysisConfiguration managementManaging multiple entities as oneService level management

SchedulingAutomating provisioningInformation publishingSynthetic transactionManage from anywhereEnterprise Manager Product family

Range of products managed by Enterprise Manager:

Range of products

EM extensibilityEnterprise Manager Grid Control architecture

Multi-tier architectureMajor componentsHigh availabilitySummary of learning

Key features of Enterprise Manager

Grid Control

Typical applications in today's world are built with multi-tiered architecture; to

manage such applications a system administrator has to navigate through multiple

management tools and consoles that come along with each product Some of the

tools have a browser interface, some have a thick client interface, or even a command

line interface Navigating through multiple management tools often involves doing

some actions from a browser or running some scripts or launching a thick client from

the command line

For example, to find bottlenecks in a J2EE application in the production environment,

an administrator has to navigate through the management console for the HTTP

server, the management console for the J2EE container, and the management

console for the database

Enterprise Manager Grid Control is a systems management product for the

monitoring and management of all of the products in the data center For the

scenario explained above, Enterprise Manager provides a common management

interface to manage an HTTP server, J2EE server and database Enterprise Manager

provides this unified solution for all products in a data center

In addition to basic monitoring, Enterprise Manager provides a unified interface

for many other administration tasks like patching, configuration compliance,

backup-recovery, and so on

Some key features of Enterprise Manager are explained here

Comprehensive view of the data center

Enterprise Manager provides a comprehensive view of the data center, where an

administrator can see all of the applications, servers, databases, network devices,

storage devices, and so on, along with performance and configuration data As the

number of all such resources is very high, this Enterprise Manager highlights the

resources that need immediate attention or that may need attention in near future

For example, a critical security patch is available that needs to be applied on some

Fusion Middleware servers, or a server that has 90% CPU utilization

The following figure shows one such view of a data center, where users can see all

entities that are monitored, that are up, that are down, that have performance alerts,

that have configuration violations and so on The user can drill down to fine-grained

views from this top-level view

The data in the top-level view and the fine-grained drill-down view can be broadly

summarized in the following categories:

Performance data

Data that shows how an IT resource is performing, that includes the current status,

overall availability over a period of time, and other performance indicators that

are specific to the resource like the average response time for a J2EE server Any

violation of acceptable performance thresholds is highlighted in this view

Configuration data

Configuration data is the configuration parameters or, configuration files captured

from an IT resource Besides the current configuration, changes in configuration are

also tracked and available from Enterprise Manager Any violation of configuration

conformance is also available For example, if a data center policy mandates that only

port 80 should be open on all servers, Enterprise Manager captures any violation of

that policy

Status of scheduled operations

In any data center there are some scheduled operations, these operations could be

something like a system administration task such as taking a backup of a database

server or some batch process that moves data across systems, for example, moving

orders from fulfillment to shipping Enterprise Manager provides a consolidated

view of the status of all such scheduled operations

Inventory

Enterprise Manager provides a listing of all hardware and software resources

with details like version numbers All of these resources are also categorized in

different buckets – for example, Oracle Application Server, WebLogic application

Server, WebSphere application are all categorized in the middleware bucket This

categorization helps the user to find resources of the same or similar type Enterprise

Manager It also captures the finer details of software resources—like patches applied

The following figure shows one such view where the user can see all middleware

entities like Oracle WebLogic Server, IBM WebSphere Server, Oracle Application

Server, and so on

Unmanned monitoring

Enterprise Manager monitors IT resources around the clock and it gathers all

performance indicators at every fixed interval Whenever a performance indicator

goes beyond the defined acceptable limit, Enterprise Manager records that

occurrence For example, if the acceptable limit of CPU utilization for a server is 70%,

then whenever CPU utilization of the server goes above 70% then that occurrence

is recorded Enterprise Manager can also send notification of any such occurrence

through common notification mechanisms like email, pager, SNMP trap, and so on

Historical data analysis

All of the performance indicators captured by Enterprise Manager are saved in

the repository Enterprise Manager provides some useful views of the data using

the system administrator that can analyze data over a period of time Besides the

fine-grained data that is collected at every fixed interval, it also provides coarse

views by rolling up the data every hour and every 24 hours

Configuration management

Enterprise Manager gathers configuration data for IT resources at regular intervals

and checks for any configuration compliance violation Any such violation is

captured and can be sent out as a notification Enterprise Manager comes with

many out-of-the-box configuration compliance rules that represent best practices;

in addition to that, system administrators can configure their own rules

All of the configuration data is also saved in the Enterprise Manager repository

Using data, the system administrator can compare the configuration of two

similar IT resources or compare the configuration of the same IT resource

at two different points in time The system administrator can also see the

configuration change history

Managing multiple entities as one

Most of the more recent applications are built with multi-tiered architecture and each

tier may run on different IT resources For example, an order booking application can

have all of its presentation and business logic running on a J2EE server, all business

data persisted in a database, all authentication and authorization performed

through an LDAP server, and all of the traffic to the application routed through

an HTTP server

To monitor such applications, all of the underlying resources need to be monitored

Enterprise Manager provides support for grouping such related IT resources

Using this support, the system administrator can monitor all related resources as

one entity and all performance indicators for all related entities can be monitored

from one interface

Service level management

Enterprise Manager provides necessary constructs and interfaces for managing

service level agreements that are based on the performance of IT resources Using

these constructs, the user can define indicators to measure service levels and

expected service levels For example, a service representing a web application can

have the same average JSP response time as a service indicator, the expected service

level for this service is to have the service indicator below three seconds for 90% of

the time during business hours

Enterprise Manager keeps track of all such indicators and violations in the context of

a service and at any time the user can see the status of such service level agreements

over a defined time period

Many data center operations are repeated at fixed interval and on multiple IT

resources For example, database backup is performed every day at midnight for

all of the database servers in a data center Typically, system administrators write

some scripts and use some scheduling mechanism like crontabs to perform these

operations Monitoring of such operations across multiple servers is expensive; the

system administrator needs to check logs on each server and maintain scripts on

each server and so on

Enterprise Manager also provides a scheduling mechanism and, using that

mechanism, the user can execute an operation on multiple resources as per the

defined schedule The outcome of all such operations, across multiple resources, is

saved in the Enterprise Manager repository and the system administrator can see all

of the results from one central console Besides that, events like the success or failure

of an operation can be sent out as notifications via standard notification mechanisms

like email, SNMP trap, and so on

Automating provisioning

Initial provisioning of new IT resources is an expensive operation; the system

administrator needs to install the Operating System, all required software like the

database, J2EE server, all required patches, and the business applications After

this, the system administrator needs to configure the software and applications

Enterprise Manager provides support for building gold images from existing IT

resources, and provisioning new IT resources from the gold image Using the gold

image, the system administrator can easily provision a new IT resource by cloning it

from an existing IT resource

Enterprise Manager also provides a software library where the gold images of

Operating Systems, software, and so on, can be stored for future use

Information publishing

System administrators do need to publish data related to their data center; like

resource utilization data, configuration compliance data, inventory of resources,

and so on Also, a lot of the data publishing activity has to be repeated at every fixed

interval, for example, resource utilization data needs to be published at the end of

every month

Enterprise Manager has a reporting and publishing framework to build and publish

reports in HTML format that summarize the data available in the Enterprise

Manager repository Report generation can be scheduled and the generated reports

are also saved in the repository These reports can be automatically sent out by

emails as per the schedule defined by the system administrators

There are many useful out-of-the-box reports that the system administrator

can use to publish performance data, configuration compliance data, and so on

System administrators can also customize or build new reports through the

intuitive user interface

Synthetic transaction

There are times when all of the performance indicators are within acceptable ranges,

but users still complain for about application performance To troubleshoot such

issues, system administrators often log in to the application to try to simulate what

the real users do Sometimes such problems are related to some specific geographic

regions only, for example, customers in Europe cannot check out the shopping cart

but customers in other countries are fine

Recording typical user actions and repeating those instructions from different

geographical regions can provide proactive monitoring for such issues Enterprise

Manager provides a framework for such support where typical user behavior can be

recorded and repeated from various geographical locations In the example above,

Enterprise Manager can record the web transaction for checking out of the shopping

cart and can repeat this synthetic transaction from various locations

Web transactions can be used for checking availability for web applications

Enterprise Manager provides other mechanisms to check the availability of

other resources like TNSPING to check the availability of a database

Manage from anywhere

Enterprise Manager has a multi-tiered architecture; with the presentation layer on a

J2EE server and content that is presented in HTML format The Enterprise Manager

console can be accessed through a browser that the system administrator can

access remotely Enterprise Manager is certified for all major browsers like

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, and so on

Enterprise Manager product family

The Oracle Enterprise Manager product family is a group of similar systems

management products and it includes:

Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control:� This flavor of Enterprise This flavor of Enterprise

Manager gets installed with the installation of a database This product

can manage one database, associated listeners and the host where database

is installed

Oracle Enterprise Manager Application Server Control: ThThis flavor of

Enterprise Manager gets installed with the installation of an Application

Server This product can manage one Application Server or an Application

Server Cluster or an Application Server Farm and the host where it

is installed

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control: Th This flavor of Enterprise Manager

needs its own installation This product can manage all of the resources in a

data center In this book we'll learn more details about this particular flavor

of Enterprise Manager product

Products managed by Enterprise

Manager

Enterprise manager is a system management product from the Oracle Corporation

that provides a set of features for the comprehensive management of Oracle

products like Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle SOA suite, Oracle

Applications, and so on Enterprise Manager also provides management support for

non-Oracle products including databases like SQL Server, middleware platforms

such as JBoss Application Server, IBM WebSphere MQ, and storage management

system such as NetApp

As mentioned in the initial introduction, data centers contain many types of IT

resources from different vendors, and different technology platforms There may

also be homegrown products or applications in data centers Enterprise Manager

provides management support for most of the common resources, but there could

be some resources for which there is no support out-of-box Enterprise Manager

provides a framework to extend management support for such resources Using

this, users and third party vendors can build custom management support In

Chapter 12, we'll cover this extensibility in more detail Functionality for such

support is packaged as plug-ins that can be deployed on top of Enterprise

Manager For example, there are some plug-ins available for NET and BizTalk

server For a complete list of available plug-ins, please refer to the Oracle web site

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Enterprise Manager also provides connectors to integrate with help desk products like

BMC Remedy or HP Service Center By integrating EM with these products, alerts on

the EM side can be converted to tickets on the help desk side and resolution of those

tickets can clear alerts generated on the EM side

The following illustration shows the range of products supported by Enterprise

Manager Grid Control:

Enterprise Manager

• Check Point Firewall Juniper Netscreen Firewall F5 BIG-IP

Nortel Alteon Switch (Partner-built)

• Oracle

• IBM DB2

• MS SQL Server (2000 and 2005)

Applications

• Oracle

• Microsoft Exchange

• SAP

Enterprise Manager Architecture

The Enterprise Manager product is built using Java technology and an Oracle

database The Enterprise Manager product runs on top of Oracle Application Server

and uses an Oracle Database as its persistence store Enterprise Manager has three

main components:

Oracle Management Service (OMS)

Oracle Management Agent (OMA)

Oracle Management Repository (OMR)

For user interactions there is a centralized console that operates upon the

Management Repository and uses services provided by the Management

Server This is a browser-based console

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